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Whenever Captain Picard ordered up some of his favorite brew, “Earl Grey tea, hot”, from the Enterprise’s replicator, it materialized right there within seconds. What seemed like pure science fiction back when Star Trek: The Next Generation was first on the air (1987 – 1994), we know today to be a very real, innovative and thriving technology called 3D printing. So it seems that Jean-Luc literally and figuratively excelled at reading the tea leaves.

These five Subway Fold posts have recently covered just a small sampling of the multitude of applications this technology has found in both the arts and sciences. (See also #3dprinting for the very latest trends and developments.)

Let us then, well, “Engage!” a related legal issue about 3D printing: Does it violate US federal copyright law in certain circumstances? A fascinating analysis of this appeared in an article on posted January 6, 2016 on ScientificAmerican.com entitled How 3-D Printing Threatens Our Patent System by Timothy Holbrook. I highly recommend reading this in its entirety. I will summarize and annotate it, and then pose some of my own non-3D questions.

Easily Downloadable and Sharable Objects

Today, anyone using a range of relatively inexpensive consumer 3D printers and a Web connection can essentially “download a physical object”. All they need to do is access a computer-aided design (CAD) file online and run it on their computer connected to their 3D printer. The CAD file provides the highly detailed and technical instructions needed for the 3D printer to fabricate the item. As seen in the photo above, this technology has the versatility to produce some very complex and intricate designs, dimensions and textures.

Since the CAD files are digital, just like music and movie files, they can be freely shared online. This makes it likely that just as music and entertainment companies were threatened by file-sharing networks, so too is it possible that 3D printing will result in directly challenging the patent system. However, this current legal framework “is even more ill-equipped” to manage this threat. Consequently, 3D printing technology may well conflict with “a key component of our innovation system”.*

The US federal government (through the US Patent and Trademark office – USPTO), issues patents for inventions they determine are “nontrivial advances in state of the art”. These documents award their holders the exclusive right to commercialize, manufacture, use, sell or import the invention, while preventing other from doing so.

Infringements, Infringers and Economic Values

Nonetheless, if 3D printing enables parties other than the patent holder to “evade the patent”, its value and incentives are diminished. Once someone else employs a 3D printer to produce an object covered by a particular patent, they have infringed on the holder’s legal rights to their invention.

In order for the patent holder to bring a case against a possible infringer, they would need to have knowledge that someone else is actually doing this. Today this would be quite difficult because 3D printers are so readily available to consumers and businesses. Alternatively, the patent laws allow the patent holder to pursue an action against anyone facilitating the means to commit the infringement. This means that manufacturers, vendors and other suppliers of CAD and 3D technologies could be potential defendants.

US copyright laws likewise prohibit the “inducement of infringement”. For example, while Grokster did not actually produce the music on its file-sharing network, it did facilitate the easy exchange of pirated music files. The music industry sued them for this activity and their operations were eventually shut down. (See also this August 31, 2015 Subway Fold post entitled Book Review of “How Music Got Free” about a recent book covering the history and consequences of music file sharing.)

This approach could also possibly be applied to 3D printing but based instead upon the patent laws. However, a significant impediment of this requires “actual knowledge of the relevant patent”. While nearly everyone knows that music is copyrighted, everyone is not nearly as aware that devices are covered by patents. 3D printers alone are covered by numerous patents that infringers are highly unlikely to know about much less abide. Moreover, how could a potentially aggrieved patent holder know about all of the infringers and infringements, especially since files can be so easily distributed online?

The author of this piece, Timothy Holbrook, a law professor at Emory University School of Law, and Professor Lucas Osborn from Campbell University School of Law, believe that the courts should focus on the CAD files to stem this problem. They frame the issue such that if the infringing object can so easily be produced with 3D printing then “should the CAD files themselves be viewed as digital patent infringement, similar to copyright law?” Furthermore, the CAD files have their own value and, when they are sold and used to 3D print an item, then such seller is benefiting from the “economic value of the invention”. The professors also believe there is no infringement if a party merely possesses a CAD file and is not selling it.

Neither Congress nor the courts have indicated whether and how they might deal with these issues.

My Questions

Would blockchain technology’s online ledger system provide patent holders with adequate protection against infringement? Because of the economic value of CAD files, perhaps under such an arrangement could they be written to the blockchain and then have Bitcoin transferred to the patent holder every time the file is downloaded. (See the August 21, 2015 Subway Fold post entitled Two Startups’ Note-Worthy Efforts to Adapt Blockchain Technology for the Music Industry which covered an innovative approach now being explored for copyrights and royalties in the music industry)

Would the digital watermarking of CAD files be a sufficient deterrent to protect against file-sharing and potentially infringing 3D printing?

What new opportunities might exist for entrepreneurs, developers and consultants to help inventors protect and monitor their patents with regard to 3D printing?

Might some inventors be willing to share the CAD files of their inventions on an open source basis online as an alternative that may improve their work while possibly avoiding any costly litigation?

These seven Subway Fold posts cover a series of other recent systems, developments and issues in intellectual property.

* If this ends up in litigation, the lawyers will add an entirely new meaning to their object-ions.

The conventional wisdom among lawyers and legal educators has long been that having a second related degree or skill from another field can be helpful in finding an appropriate career path. That is, a law degree plus, among others, an MBA, engineering or nursing degree can be quite helpful in finding an area of specialization that leverages both fields. There are synergies and advantages to be shared by both the lawyers and their clients in these circumstances.

Recently, this something extra has expanded to include very timely applied tech and tech business skills. Two recently reported developments highlight this important emerging trend. One involves a new generation of attorneys who have a depth of coding skills and the other is an advanced law degree to prepare them for positions in the tech and entrepreneurial marketplaces. Let’s have a look at them individually and then what they might means together for legal professionals in a rapidly changing world. I will summarize and annotate both of them, and compile a few plain text questions of my own.

The first article features four young lawyers who have found productive ways to apply their coding skills at their law offices. This story appeared in the November 13, 2015 edition of The Recorder (subscription required) entitled Lawyers Who Code Hack New Career Path by Patience Haggin. I highly recommend reading it in its entirely.

During an interview at Apple for a secondment (a form of temporary arrangement where a lawyer from a firm will join the in-house legal department of a client)¹, a first-year lawyer named Canek Acosta was asked where he knew how to use Excel. He “laughed – and got the job” at Apple. In addition to his law degree, he had majored in computer science and math as an undergraduate.

Using his combination of skills, Acosta wrote scripts that automated certain tasks, including budget spreadsheets, for Apple’s legal department. As a result, some new efficiencies were achieved. Acosta believes that his experience at Apple was helpful in subsequently getting hired at the law firm of O’Melvany & Myers as an associate.

While his experience is currently uncommon, law firms are expected to increasingly recruit law students to become associates who have such contemporary skills in addition to their legal education. Furthermore, some of these students are sidestepping traditional roles in law practice and finding opportunities in law practice management and other non-legal staff roles that require a conflation of “legal analysis and hacking skills”.

Acosta further believes that a “hybrid lawyer-programmer” can locate the issues in law office operational workflows and then resolve them. Now at O’Melvany, in addition to his regular responsibilities as a litigation associate, he is also being asked to use his programming ability to “automate tasks for the firm or a client matter”.

At the San Francisco office of Winston & Strawn, first-year associate Joseph Mornin has also made good use of his programming skills. While attending UC-Berkeley School of Law, he wrote a program to assist legal scholars in generating “permanent links when citing online sources”. He also authored a browser extension called Bestlaw that “adds features to Westlaw“, a major provider of online legal research services.

2. Consultants and Project Managers

In Chicago, the law firm Seyfarth Shaw has a legal industry consulting subsidiary called SeyfarthLean. One of their associate legal solutions architects is Amani Smathers. She believes that lawyers will have to be “T-shaped” whereby they will need to combine their “legal expertise” with other skills including “programming, or marketing, or project management“.² Although she is also a graduate of Michigan State University College of Law, instead of practicing law, she is on a team that provides consulting for clients on, among other things, data analytics. She believes that “legal hacking jobs” may provide alternatives to other attorneys not fully interested in more traditional forms of law practices.

A New and Unique LLM to be Offered Jointly by Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech

The second article concerned the announcement of a new 1-year, full-time Master of Laws program (which confers an “LLM” degree), to be offered jointly by Cornell Law School and Cornell Tech (a technology-focused graduate and research campus of Cornell in New York City). This LLM is intended to provide practicing attorneys and other graduates with specialized skills needed to support and to lead tech companies. In effect, the program combines elements of law, technology and entrepreneurship. This news was carried in a post on October 29, 2015 on The Cornell Daily Sun entitled Cornell Tech, Law School Launch New Degree Program by Annie Bui.

According to Cornell’s October 27, 2015 press release , students in this new program will be engaged in “developing products and other solutions to challenges posed by companies”. They will encounter real-world circumstances facings businesses and startups in today’s digital marketplace. This will further include studying the accompanying societal and policy implications.

The program is expected to launch in 2016. It will be relocated from a temporary site and then moved to the Cornell Tech campus on Roosevelt Island in NYC in 2017.

My Questions

What other types of changes, degrees and initiatives are needed for law schools to better prepare their graduates for practicing in the digital economy? For example, should basic coding principles be introduced in some classes such as first-year contracts to enable students to better handle matters involving Bitcoin and the blockchain when they graduate? (See these four Subway Fold posts on this rapidly expanding technology.)

Will or should the Cornell Law/Cornell Tech LLM syllabus offer the types of tech and tech business skills taught by the Michigan State’s LegalRnD program? What do each of these law schools’ programs discussed here possibly have to offer to each other? What unique advantage(s) might an attorney with an LLM also have if he or she can do some coding?

Are there any law offices out there that are starting to add an attorney’s tech skills and coding capabilities to their evaluation of potential job candidates? Are legal recruiters adding these criteria to job descriptions for searching they are conducting?

Are there law offices out there that are beginning to take an attorney’s tech skills and/or coding contributions into account during annual performance reviews? If not, should they now considering adding them and how should they be evaluated?

Casey Stengel had a very long, productive and colorful career in professional baseball as a player for five teams and later as a manager for four teams. He was also consistently quotable (although not to the extraordinary extent of his Yankee teammate Yogi Berra). Among the many things Casey said was his frequent use of the imperative “You could look it up”¹.

Transposing this gem of wisdom from baseball to law practice², looking something up has recently taken on an entirely new meaning. According to a fascinating article posted on Wired.com on August 8, 2015 entitled Your Lawyer May Soon Ask for This AI-Powered App for Legal Help by Davey Alba, a startup called ROSS Intelligence has created a unique new system for legal research. I will summarize, annotate and pose a few questions of my own.

One of the founders of ROSS, Jimoh Ovbiagele (@findingjimoh), was influenced by his childhood and adolescent experiences to pursue studying either law or computer science. He chose the latter and eventually ended up working on an artificial intelligence (AI) project at the University of Toronto. It occurred to him then that machine learning (a branch of AI), would be a helpful means to assist lawyers with their daily research requirements.

Mr. Ovbiagele joined with a group of co-founders from diverse fields including “law to computers to neuroscience” in order to launch ROSS Intelligence. The legal research app they have created is built upon the AI capabilities of IBM’s Watson as well as voice recognition. Since June, it has been tested in “small-scale pilot programs inside law firms”.

Essentially, the new ROSS app enables users to ask legal research questions in natural language. (See also the July 31, 2015 Subway Fold post entitled Watson, is That You? Yes, and I’ve Just Demo-ed My Analytics Skills at IBM’s New York Office.) Similar in operation to Apple’s Siri, when a question is verbally posed to ROSS, it searches through its data base of legal documents to provide an answer along with the source documents used to derive it. The reply is also assessed and assigned a “confidence rating”. The app further prompts the user to evaluate the response’s accuracy with an onscreen “thumbs up” or “thumbs down”. The latter will prompt ROSS to produce another result.

Andrew Arruda (@AndrewArruda), another co-founder of ROSS, described the development process as beginning with a “blank slate” version of Watson into which they uploaded “thousands of pages of legal documents”, and trained their system to make use of Watson’s “question-and-answer APIs³. Next, they added machine learning capabilities they called “LegalRank” (a reference to Google’s PageRank algorithm), which, among others things, designates preferential results depending upon the supporting documents’ numbers of citations and the deciding courts’ jurisdiction.

ROSS is currently concentrating on bankruptcy and insolvency issues. Mr. Ovbiagele and Mr. Arruda are sanguine about the possibilities of adding other practice areas to its capabilities. Furthermore, they believe that this would meaningfully reduce the $9.6 billion annually spent on legal research, some of which is presently being outsourced to other countries.

In another recent and unprecedented development, the global law firm Dentons has formed its own incubator for legal technology startups called NextLaw Labs. According to this August 7, 2015 news release on Denton’s website, the first company they have signed up for their portfolio is ROSS Intelligence.

Although it might be too early to exclaim “You could look it up” at this point, my own questions are as follows:

What pricing model(s) will ROSS use to determine the cost structure of their service?

Will ROSS consider making its app available to public interest attorneys and public defenders who might otherwise not have the resources to pay for access fees?

Will ROSS consider making their service available to the local, state and federal courts?

Should ROSS make their service available to law schools or might this somehow impair their traditional teaching of the fundamentals of legal research?

Will ROSS consider making their service available to non-lawyers in order to assist them in represent themselves on a pro se basis?

In addition to ROSS, what other entrepreneurial opportunities exist for other legal startups to deploy Watson technology?

Will other large law firms, as well as medium and smaller firms, and in-house corporate departments soon be following this lead?

Will they instead wait and see whether this produces tangible results for attorneys and their clients?

If so, what would these results look like in terms of the quality of legal services rendered, legal business development, client satisfaction, and/or the incentives for other legal startups to move into the legal AI space?

In the highly competitive world of creating, monetizing, defending and challenging tech-based intellectual property, “free” is neither a word often heard nor an offer frequently made.

However, Google has just begun a new program, for a limited time, to give away a certain types of patents they own to an initial group of 50 startups. This is principally being done in an effort to resist time and resources devouring litigation with “patent trolls“, companies that purchase patents for no other purpose than to litigate infringement claims in their attempts to win monetary judgments. (We first visited this issue in an April 21, 2015 Subway Fold post entitled New Analytics Process Uses Patent Data to Predict Advancements in Specific Technologies.)

In April 2015, Google successfully started a temporary program for companies to offer to sell them (Google) their patents. Then on July 23, 2015, they launched a reciprocal program to give away, at no cost, “non-organic” patents (that is, those purchased by Google from third parties), to startups.

The recipients of these giveaways are required to abide by two primary conditions:

They must join the LOT Network for two years. This is a tech industry association of patent owners dedicated to reducing the volume of patent troll-driven litigation.

The patents can only be used defensively to “protect a company against another patent suit”. Thus, the patents cannot be used to bring a case “against another company” or else its ownership “reverts back to Google”.

Kurt Brasch, one of Google’s senior patent licensing managers who was interviewed for the TechCrunch story, expects other members of the LOT Network to start their own similar programs.

For any of the 50 startups to be eligible for Google’s program, another key requirement is that their 2014 revenues must fall between $500,000 and $20 million. Next, if eligibility is determined, within 30 days they will receive “a list of three to five families of patents”, from which they can make their selection. Still, Google “will retain a broad, nonexclusive license to all divested assets”, as these patents might still be important to the company.

For those startups that apply and are determined to be ineligible, Google will nonetheless provide them with access “to its own database of patents”. These are presumed to alas be categorized as “non-organic”. The unselected startups will be able to ask Google to consider “the potential purchase of any such assets”.

Back in April, when Google began their acquisitions of patents, they were approached by many operating companies and patent brokers. Both types of entities told Mr. Brasch about a “problem in the secondary market“. These businesses were looking for an alternative means to sell their patents to Google and Mr. Brasch was seeking a means to assist interested buyers and sellers.

Google eventually purchased 28% of the patents they were offered that the company felt could potentially be used in their own operations. As these patents were added to Google’s patent portfolio, a portion of them were categorized as “non-organic” and, as such, the company is now seeking to give them away.

Both sides of Google’s latest patent initiative demonstrate two important strategic points as the company is now:

Taking more action in enabling other tech firms to provide assistance against litigation brought by troll-driven lawsuits.

Presenting the company as a comprehensive “broker and portal” for patents matters.

While both the purchasing and selling operations of Google’s effort to test new approaches to the dynamics of the patent marketplace appear to be limited, they might become more permanent later on depending on the results achieved. Mr. Brasch also anticipates continuing development of this patent market going forward either from his company or a larger “group of organizations”. Just as Google has moved into other commercial sector including, among others, “shopping, travel and media”, so too does he expect the appearance of more new and comparable marketplaces.

My own questions are as follows:

In addition to opposing patent troll litigation, what other policy, public relations, technical and economic benefits does Google get from their new testbed of marketplace services?

What other industries would benefit from Google’s new marketplace? What about pharmaceuticals and medical devices, materials science (see these four recent Subway Fold posts in this category), and/or automotive and aerospace?

Should Google limit this project only to startups? Would they consider a more expansive multi-tiered approach to include different ranges of yearly revenue? If so, how might the selection of patents to be offered and other eligibility requirements be decided?

Might there be some instances where Google and perhaps other companies would consider giving away non-organic patents to the public domain and allowing further implementation and development of them to operate on an open source basis? (These 10 Subway Fold posts have variously touched upon open source projects and methods.)

“Data Represented in an Interactive 3D Form”, Image by Idaho National Laboratory

Intuit’s in-house legal team has recently undertaken a significant and successful collaborative effort with the company’s data scientists. While this initiative got off to an uneasy start, this joining (and perhaps somewhat of a joinder, too), of two seemingly disparate departments has gone on to produce some very positive results.

Bill Loconzolo, the Intuit’s VP of Data Engineering and Analytics, and Laura Fennel, the Chief Counsel and Head of the Legal, Data, Compliance and Policy, tell this instructive story and provide four highly valuable object lessons in an article entitled Data Scientists and Lawyers: A Marriage Made in Silicon Valley, posted on July 2, 2015 on VentureBeat.com. I will sum up, annotate, and pose a few questions of my own requiring neither a law degree nor advanced R programming skills to be considered.

Mr. Loconzolo and Ms. Fennel initially recognized there might be differences between their company’s data scientists and the in-house Legal Department because the former are dedicated to innovation with “sensitive customer data”, while the latter are largely risk averse. Nonetheless, when these fundamentally different mindsets were placed into a situation where they were “forced to collaborate”, this enabled the potential for both groups to grow.¹

Under the best of circumstances, they sought to assemble “dynamic teams that drive results” that they could not have achieved on their own. They proceeded to do this in the expectation that the results would generate “a much smarter use of big data”. This turned out to be remarkably true for the company.

Currently, the Data Engineering and Analytics group reports to the Legal Department. At first, the data group wanted to move quickly in order to leverage the company’s data from a base of 50 million customers. At the same time, the Legal Department was concerned because of this data’s high sensitivity and potential for damage through possible “mistake or misuse”. ²Both groups wanted to reconcile this situation where the data could be put to its most productive uses while simultaneously ensuring that it would be adequately protected.

Despite outside skepticism, this new arrangement eventually succeeded and the two teams “grew together to become one”. The four key lessons that Mr. Loconzolo and Ms. Fennel learned and share in their article for teaming up corporate “odd couples” include:

“Shared Outcome”: A shared vision of success held both groups together. As well, a series of Data Stewardship Principles were written for both groups to abide. Chief among them was that the data belonged to the customers.

“Shared Accountability”: The entire integrated team, Legal plus Data, were jointly and equally responsible for their outcomes, including successes and failures, of their work. This resulted in “barriers” being removed and “conflict” being transformed into “teamwork”.

“Healthy Tension Builds Trust”: While both groups did not always agree, trust between them was established so that all perspectives “could be heard” and goals were common to everyone.

“A Learning Curve”: Both groups have learned much from each other that has improved their work. The legal team is now using the data team’s “rapid experimentation innovation techniques” while the data team has accepted “a more rigorous partnership mindset” regarding continually learning from others.

The authors believe that bringing together such different groups can be made to work and, once established, “the possibilities are endless”.

I say bravo to both of them for succeeding in their efforts, and generously and eloquently sharing their wisdom and insights online.

My own questions are as follows:

What are the differences in lawyers’ concerns and the data scientists’ concerns about the distinctions between correlation and causation in their conclusions and actions? (Similar issues have been previously raised in these six Subway Fold posts.)

Is the Legal Department collecting and analyzing its own operation big data? If so, for what overall purposes? Are the data scientists correspondingly seeing new points of view, analytical methods and insights that are possibly helpful to their own projects?

What metrics and benchmarks are used by each department jointly and separately to evaluate the successes and failures of their collaboration with each other? Similarly, what, if any, considerations of their collaboration are used in the annual employee review process?

There have been many efforts over the past few decades to use visualization methods and technologies to create graphical representations of the law. These have been undertaken by innovative lawyers in diversity of settings including public and private practice, and in legal academia.

I wrote an article about this topic years ago entitled “Graphics and Visualization: Drawing on All Your Resources”, in the August 25, 1992* edition of the New York Law Journal. (No link is currently available.) Not to paint with too broad a brush here, but things have changed dramatically since then in terms of how and why to create compelling legal visualizations.

Two very interesting projects have recently gotten significant notice online for their ingenuity and the deeper levels of understanding they have facilitated.

First are the legal visualizations of Harry Surden. He is a professor at the University of Colorado School of Law. He teaches, researches and writes about intellectual property law, legal informatics, legal automation and information privacy.

I had the opportunity to hear the professor speak at the Reinvent Law NYC program held in New York in February 2014. This was a memorable one-day event with about 40 speakers who captivated the audience with their presentations about the multitude of ways that technology is dramatically changing the contemporary marketplace for legal services.

US Code Explorer 1 consisting of a nested tree structure for Title 35 of the US Code covering patents. Clicking on each levels starting with Part I and continuing through V will, in turn, open up to the Chapters, Sections and Subsections. This is an immediately accessible interactive means to unfold Title 35’s structure.

Professor Surden’s visualizations are instantly and intuitively navigable as soon as you view them. As a result, you will immediately be drawn into exploring them. For legal professionals and the public alike, he impressively presents these displays in a clear manner that belies the complexities of the underlying laws. I highly recommend clicking through to check out and navigate all of these imaginative visualizations. Furthermore, I hope his work inspires others to experiment with additional forms of visualization of the other federal, state and local codes, laws and regulations.

The full-text of the Law Review article contains the very engaging details and methodologies employed. Moreover, it demonstrates the incredible amount of analytical work the authors spent to arrive at their findings. Just as one example, please have a look at the network visualization on Page 29 entitled Figure 5. LANS Graph of Stylistic Similarity Between Justices. It truly brings the author’s efforts to life. I believe this article is a very instructive, well, case where the graphics and text skillfully elevate each other’s effectiveness.

* To get online then you needed something called a Lynx browser that only displayed text after you connected with a very zippy 14.4K dial-up modem. What fun it was back then!

When an author writes a book about his or her lengthy and distinguished career and infuses the text with an endless passion for their work, the reader’s attention is likely to be quickly captured. It is rare indeed when someone truly loves what they do and can convincingly convey their experiences, insights and commentary for all readers to thoroughly enjoy and absorb the lessons within. Attorney and author James D. Zirin has done a masterful job of achieving this informative and entertaining mix in his new book entitled The Mother Court: Tales of Cases that Mattered in America’s Greatest Trial Court (American Bar Association, 2014).

The “Mother Court” is the U.S. District Court for the Southern District of New York (SDNY). Mr. Zirin has had a remarkable career which has provided him a wealth of material to explore. He began his career as an Assistant U.S. Attorney in the SDNY, working for Robert Morgenthau. He then continued on to become a distinguished trial attorney in private practice. He is a prolific writer and the host of the ongoing TV show Conversations in the Digital Age. (Click through the link above to his site to review his extensive work richly linked within it.)

The book is organized into sections about a series of landmark cases tried in the SDNY, trial techniques, judges he has appeared before, the changes and challenges in the court during his career all the way through modern trial technology and sentencing guidelines. His skillful prose, storytelling technique*, and endless enthusiasm for the law and respect for the SDNY as an institution, permeate each page. I believe he would have achieved the same possession of the reader’s attention if he had, in some alternative life, been almost anything else from a doctor to professor to inventor.

He presents an insightful array of legal practice stories and subject analyses that are not just meant to be “inside baseball” for lawyers only, but rather, a genuine and granular sense of litigation practice from his admiring point of view. Thus, I believe that anyone who works in the legal profession as well as anyone who does not, will enjoy reading Zirin’s paean to the SDNY.

In the midst of all this legal lore, there is also a brief and hilarious story near the end about a sidebar conference during a trial concerning an observer in the courtroom who might have been creating a distraction. The inclusion and execution of it also speaks very well of the author’s literary craft.

Returning to a concise and critical phrase we always used to include in all of our book reports at Public School 79 in Queens, I definitely recommend this book to everyone in the class.